Increasingly, stores, malls, amusement parks, tourist areas, sporting arenas are becoming very large and geographically dispersed. The small mom and pop stores are dying breeds. This is especially true with the advent of Walmart and the desire of enterprises to compete on the same scale as Walmart. Consequently, most stores sell a huge variety of goods and services to customers and want customers to come to those stores for all their purchasing needs.
In an increasing frenzy to reduce expenses, many enterprises have deployed self-serve checkout kiosks for customers to use to conclude purchases at the enterprises. These kiosks make stores more competitive because fewer store personnel are needed to assist customers checking out of the stores and because customers can exit the stores with their purchases more quickly and are therefore more satisfied with their experience with the stores.
Yet, some customers are still very uncomfortable with the technology associated with self-serve checkouts and still demand to checkout via a cashier lane. Even so, enterprises have sought to reduce staff associated with manning these cashier terminals. This is done by having the cashier perform multiple tasks such as checkout out the customer and bagging the customer's goods into sacks at the checkout area. In some environments, enterprises have attempted to increase cashier productivity by implemented a baggage configuration in a spinning “carrousel” configuration. In other environments, the stores have bags and an area during checkout with a cashier where the customer can bag his/her goods on his/her own.
One problem with this automation is that most customers may have a plurality of purchases they are placed in multiple checkout bags. As a result, customers often leave some bags behind unknowingly. This causes confusion at the store after the customer leaves and the customer may not even realize that something was left behind at all or the customer may not realize it for extended period of time.
In addition, the cashier becomes confused as to who should have the goods left behind or may even inadvertently give goods left behind to a next customer that did not purchase the goods.